Sex Education

It doesn’t matter if you’ve done it or not, sex is the basis of human evolution. Sex seems to appear everywhere we go, ranging from sexually provocative advertisements to spiritual traditions. This mysterious phenomenon takes form everywhere yet it seems to be silent and taboo in the most important infrastructural system we have today – schools. Children in most schools begin receiving education regarding sex and sexual organs around 5th or 6th grade and in some cases – never. I believe I speak for most kids when I say that speaking about sex will always be an uncomfortable topic, especially in school. Upon entering middle school, most kids have already begun sensing their inner sexual desire and curiosity, and they all have questions that they are not sure they want the answer to. How can kids begin to question their sexual curiosity if they’ve never discussed it with anyone else before? This is in fact, a big challenge for all kids.

In my own school, sex education begins in 6th grade and the topics covered are puberty, male and female reproductive systems and body changes that happen during adolescence. The problem that I see with this is that even the teachers, let alone the students, find the topic awkward to discuss. This eventually turns the entire classroom lesson into an uncomfortable setting. The subject should be taught with more adequacy. Teaching students about sex with more adequacy and less embarrassment will make them more feel more comfortable with asking questions about sex. In 7th grade we began learning about STDs and go into detail about the reproductive organs. I believe that at this point, kids start to see sex as something dangerous. I agree they must be taught about the dangers of sex, but it is almost equally as dangerous to cloud the natural beauty of sex with fear. By the time most teenagers are in 7th grade, most of their knowledge concerning sex comes from superficial depictions of sex in porn, crude and usually inaccurate depictions of sex on tv/movies. Education systems around the world seem to be sugarcoating the idea of sex and portraying it as something scientific and specific, rather than something spiritual and artistic.

Kids have good questions and they deserve good answers. This is exactly why sex education is extremely important to any kid in their adolescence. In the United States, only 22 states mandate sex education and only 13 of those states require that the information be medically accurate. This statistic is proof that education regarding sex is going in a wrong direction. Sex has become a taboo in so many cultures that humans are beginning to forget the beneficial pleasure that sex brings to the soul. In my high school, we receive sexual education in the 9th and 10th grade and at this point, the topic seems to be one that all teachers do just to get over with it.

My concluding points summarize to this: Sex is a beautiful act that all humans deserve to experience and to make it a taboo in society is a crime against human nature. We must educate children about sex at an early age and explain to them in detail that it is not something to be afraid of. Most importantly, we must approach them with the topic in a comfortable and casual way in order for them to feel more comfortable with asking questions. As humans, we must be careful not to lose the spiritual & artistic element of sex by covering it with things that we fear. That being said, I will now leave you with a thought-provoking quote by Oscar Wilde: “Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power”.